When talking about how I wasn’t a Jim Benning guy, I made references to the Canucks goaltending situation and how I felt that Jim Benning mishandled things with the Canucks and how there’s a potential storm brewing on the horizon. I didn’t really explain what this encroaching storm could be.

I pointed out that Benning got less value than what he could have for Lack, because team management holds two paradoxical opinions: one, that Lack isn’t worth much as a goaltender and two, Lack is good enough of a goaltender that he needs to be moved out of the Western Conference so as to minimize the damage he could do to the Canucks.

I also talked about how the Canucks goaltending is “unstable” and I’m going to try and address that, by looking at similar situations that have occurred in the past with the Canucks and how they have gone wrong, or right. This article is going to take a closer look at why Benning may have messed up.

The TL;DR of it is: Ryan Miller’s use to the organization is going to wear out before the Canucks have a viable successor in place, the Canucks haven’t had much luck with thrusting young goalies into prominent positions and expecting them to succeed whereas the Canucks have had better luck with slowly developing goalies and easing them into an NHL role.

At first glance, the recent scandal with Jian Ghomeshi seems to be a perfect point of comparison to GamerGate. You have a man accused of a number of gross behaviours, many of them sexual in nature. He was part of the more “progressive” movement, speaking up as an ally for feminist issues and causes. You have random Twitter accounts. Harassment. Cries for lawyers. People coming out to speak up. So yeah, it seems that this is perfect fodder for Yet Another GG Piece.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

The Toronto Star published an article Wednesday talking about other details of Ghomeshi’s life that are now coming to light. The now disgraced CBC posterboy apparently had a rather large conflict of interest going on with guests booked on his show: a great deal many of them shared the same booking agent as Ghomeshi.

As though I haven’t mentioned the word “Harper” enough to warrant an investigation from Ed Greenwood or CSIS, here are some more thoughts regarding what’s going on with some recent developments pertaining to the GamerGate Autoblocker.

Probably. But I did want to talk about GamerGate, considering that I have written about video games and media coverage in the past on here, and arts and media criticism is one of the things that I “do” on here. It scratches a particular itch in my brain, and I’ve found I haven’t been able to avoid all the coverage cropping up on the web these days.

I wanted to touch on recent events and this will probably be a kickoff to discussing other stuff relating to GamerGate.

One of the more popular pieces I had last season was during the playoffs, when I did a ‘Meet the Kings’ bit. It was a comedic bit that talked a bit about the players on the roster.

Since the regular NHL season is pretty darn close, I thought I’d take the spotlight off them and focus it on another member of the Northwest Division. First up is a team that probably has had more hype and attention this offseason than any other team that is not the Toronto Maple Leafs: the Edmonton Oilers.

I thought it’d be fun to take a not-serious approach to things, and try and get all the other NW Division teams written up as well. We’ll see how it goes through the next couple of days. Keep in mind this is all in fun and is not meant to be a serious take on the Oilers, so calm down before sending me an angry e-mail.

There’s been a bit of a debate raging on in the last little while with hockey bloggers and the self-styled ‘mainstream media.’ It started off with some Toronto Maple Leafs bloggers taking issue with the Toronto Sun lifting material of their own wholesale and without attribution. This led to potshots being taken from both sides, mainstream journalists like Steve Simmons wading in on Twitter and Damien Cox (probably) blocking a bunch of people on Twitter in response.

Pretty typical as far as Internet slapfights go, although notable due to the fact that this was yet another instance of ‘bloggers’ getting another strike of credibility as the mainstream media continues to lavish attention on the greasy, unwashed blogger masses.

Forewarning: Despite being a geek and a bit of a comic book nerd I’ve never really sunk myself into Iron Man all that much. I’m somewhat familiar with the character, most of it dealing with the 80s version of Tony Stark/Iron Man. So if my understanding is fundamentally flawed, sorry. Also, I do have a Canucks post in the pipeline. I’d just like to take a little while to get away from the sting of having been eliminated. Probably a little later tonight, okay?

So I had caught Iron Man 2 the other day and it was an interesting flick. How interesting could a run of the mill summer action flick based on a comic book title actually be? Well, given that I am a gigantic fan of The Dark Knight and everything Christopher Nolan did with that particular film and the first Iron Man flick, I had to say that I was hoping for more good things.

The question for me, though, after watching Iron Man 2 was whether the film was a poorly constructed neoconservative’s wetdream or a clever satire on American foreign policy/militaristic attitudes that was limited due to the film’s subject matter.

There is a third option, of course: I’m fucking overanalyzing the hell out of the film, so keep that one in mind as I go through this review.

Like most people, I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the bands that were involved with the closing ceremonies to the Winter Games Sunday night. Inward Eye, Simple Plan, Hedley, Nickelback and Avril Lavigne to close out the biggest international sporting event held in Canada in over 22 years? Horrible.

Let’s get one thing out of the way really quickly: I think Martin Brodeur is an excellent goaltender, arguably one of the greatest of all time. I believe he ‘earned’ the right to start against the United States on Super Sunday: his credentials, along with a strong performance against Switzerland paved the way for Brodeur to start.

This blog post isn’t about Martin Brodeur. What it is about, though, is Damien Cox and his love affair with Martin Brodeur and the subsequent behavior that sprung out of said affair.

So almost 24 hours later I’m writing up the postscript to last night’s game. I apologize for not having a write up done earlier, for the scant few of you who are dying to know what I thought of the game (hi Mom.) Anyway, I was hopping over to NHL.com to check something out and I scanned the headlines bar really quickly. And, well…

Why are you people coming here for my insight? I am clearly a 10 year old trapped in an adult’s body. Seriously.